Category Archives: Sherry Magee

Last week, the collection passed 19,500 cards. Given the amount of product that Topps & Panini will likely issue this year, reaching 20,000 by year’s end seems inevitable — even if I don’t purchase anything other than 2014 releases as they hit store shelves. Having started this blog in May 2011 in anticipation of adding card #14,000 to my collection, it’s quite mind-boggling to me that I will have expanded the collection so much in such a short period of time.

It just so happens that the start of this blog coincided with a steady improvement in my finances which allowed an explosion in the size of my collection. The primary driver of this massive growth resulted from my back-filling most of the product released from 2004 through 2010. While I have never stopped collecting at any time in my life, budgetary constraints during that period forced me to be very selective in what I was adding to the collection. Of the 5,500 cards I’ve added during the past three years, I don’t know exactly what percentage comes from that seven-year period, but it’s clearly more than half. I know this because I do know how many cards issued from 2011 through the present I’ve added: 2,039. That actually overstates my keeping up with ongoing releases because when this blog started, I already had, at an absolute minimum, at least 100 cards that had already been issued in 2011.

But not all of the remaining 3,400+ cards come from the ’00s. The final driver of this growth was related to my decision in 2004 to drastically cutback on my purchase of new product. In addition to that change in how I collected, I needed to sell a significant amount of the vintage portion of my collection — in particular, cards predating Topps’s standardization of card sizes in 1957. I replaced most of those cards with reprints and tried to make do with them, but they just weren’t the same. However, the same financial freedom that allowed me to pick up so much of the material from 2004-2010 also allowed me to start rebuilding the pre-1957 portion of my collection. Sadly, that is still very much a work in progress, and I’m starting to believe that I will never again own a few of the complete team sets that formerly resided in my collection. However, I will persevere — over the past few years I’ve gotten lucky and obtained some great pre-WW II cards at surprisingly low prices, and it’s certainly possible that similar fortunate pickups are in my future.

Looking forward to #20,000, I’m certain that I’m going to want to pickup something special once I’m in sight of that milestone. What that card might be is still very uncertain. I know I’d like for it to be a notable pre-WW II card or an extremely short-printed modern insert, but when the time comes, it may very well be something a simple as a common 2014 — especially if it comes as part of a complete Phillies team set of the newest release.

Manufacturer: American Tobacco CompanyCard Dimensions: Approximately 17⁄16” x 2⅝”Additional Information/14,000 Phillies Commentary: Almost certainly the most famous and the most important of the 20th century tobacco issues. Thanks to the wide array of different backs, there are 146 confirmed different total variations of the 13 basic Phillies cards in the T206 set. Thankfully, modern collectors have a wonderful resource tool, T206Resource.com, for learning about the history of the set, seeing samples of all the different backs, and getting a breakdown of all the variations and levels of scarcity. The cards are not numbered; although both Beckett and SCD employ the same numbering system, which assigns numbers after listing all the players in alphabetical order by last name, they differ in how they handle what appear to be errors rather than variations. This results in slightly differing checklists. For example, Beckett assigns the “Magie” portrait error its own card number while SCD assigns it the same number as the corrected version, appending the numbers with (a) and (b) designations to denote error and corrected card. The SCD system is used in the checklist below.

For the purposes of this checklist, it should be noted that with the exception of the “Magie” error, the “Piedmont 350” and “Sweet Caporal 350, 30” backs are the two only backs with which all the Phillies cards appear. Interestingly, the “Magie” error is only available with the “Piedmont 150” back, which makes sense once you understand the history of the set. In order to more concisely list all the possible variations, each possible T206 back (other than the “Piedmont 350” and “Sweet Caporal 350, 30”) is listed after the primary checklist and is followed by just the assigned numbers of the cards that possess that back. These lists would not have been possible without the help of T206Resource.com. Furthermore, only the confirmed cards as of January 9, 2013 are listed here. The lists will be revised accordingly when confirmations of other player/back combinations take place.

Finally, Topps has recycled the T206 designs on numerous occasions. Most notably, the 2002, 2009, & 2010 Topps 206 sets (the 2002 set includes reprints of the “Magie” error and the corrected version of the card), as well as for its 2010/2011 eTopps T206 Tribute cards. Topps also used it as part of its 2008 Topps Trading Card History inserts, but no Phillies appeared with the design.